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Winner

Congratulations to Michael Rinnan for winning the Five Second Project for March. His entry had a great concept and was outfitted with excellent lighting, atmosphere, camera movements and sound design.

We wanted to know a little bit more about Michael’s entry, so we asked him a few questions regarding his workflow and the process for creating his winning piece.

Where do you work? What is your title? Tell us about what you do at your company.

I am a 3D generalist at NFL films in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey. Working for the NFL brings a variety of different projects from NFL network show titles and graphics, to in stadium crowd prompts and opens, and client commercial work.

How did you come up with your concept for the Bright Lights Five Second Project?

For my concept, my goal was to come up with a quick story I could tell in 5 seconds. I wanted to lead the viewer in one direction and have that twist at the end to make it interesting.

What was the most challenging thing about your project?

The most challenging part of this project was honestly the lighting. I needed to make the scene feel dark so that the lights of the motorcycles would be the main focus, yet still be able to show off the details of the deer and environment.

Tell us a little about how you achieved the zolly (push-pull zoom) effect.

To achieve the zolly, I initially mapped out the motion of the motorcycles with a spline and then dropped a camera onto that motion path. The effect comes when the camera is moving forward towards the subject and the lens zooms out. I animated the field of view (horizontal) parameter in the camera settings.

What renderer was used? Was there anything you needed to do to keep render times down?

For this animation I used Cinema’s standard renderer to save time. Everything was rendered into passes (Beauty, AO, reflection for the road, Object Buffers for deer, bikes, and moon) To keep render times low, I decided not to use GI. Instead I gave the characters and landscape a slight Fresnel look, which gave it a “backlight” feel and an overall style.

How long did your piece take to make?

This project took about 5 nights (after work) to make. It was really fun, so time slipped away from me and I was working from about 6pm to 1am every night.

What do you enjoy most about participating in the Greyscalegorilla five second project?

I think the best thing about participating in 5 Seconds Projects is hands down the community! Everyone shares a passion for the same thing and there is so much support and feedback. You guys give inspiration to people like me in the field and to aspiring 3D artists. It’s a good feeling and it gives me motivation to participate as much as I can in our Cinema 4D community.

We also hand-picked a great group of honorable mentions below. Look for the next Five Second Project coming up in April.

Honorable Mentions

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Comment Rules

This is a friendly community. Please treat everyone with respect. We don't all have to agree, but we do have to be nice. Criticism is fine, but rude comments and name calling will be deleted. Use your real name and don't be spammy. Thanks for adding to the conversation.

Sven

giangianni

The winner’s piece…:
Cool story that perfectly fits the 5 secs.
Cool design.
Cool lighting.
Cool details, animation and editing.
Perhaps just the sound design could’ve been improved.
But this is to me one of the best executed jobs made for the 5 sec prj.
Tons of respect.

Devin Sloan

Marcus Martinez

The scene is literately found in multiple movies , so with that in mind i believe this person was not the real winner. Recreating this is an amazing technical feet but not artistic or even creative. Also GSG has a big enough community of mature adults to vote? right. Do i sound like I’m whining, maybe so but fair is fair. If you base your decision purely on technical aspects then those animations should be contained within its own category away from artistic designs. What you like is subjective but placing artistic vs technical is doomed to be one sided based solely on the technical/artistic bias of the judge, an not so much the actual content. And if your argument is it looks better that would be a lie its very visually sub par for the allotted amount of time.

Marcus Martinez

Alexander Abramov has a beautiful render, In retrospect i was whining sorry about that. I mean thats what we all possess is passion for the program, mine just got a bit outta hand. Im so embarrassed. sorry again.

Gasta

Comment Rules

This is a friendly community. Please treat everyone with respect. We don't all have to agree, but we do have to be nice. Criticism is fine, but rude comments and name calling will be deleted. Use your real name and don't be spammy. Thanks for adding to the conversation.

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Greyscalegorilla is an active community and resource for training and tools for creative types. We make helpful, fun tutorials and build tools to help artists make beautiful work that they love.